Metrograph celebrates the originality and wit of Southeast Asian cinema

A man fills an empty vase with water, then with a fish, at the sound of a bell; the vengeful spirit of an appliance factory employee possesses humidifiers and industrial ventilation systems at his old workplace, angrily wheezing his accusations and complaints; a botanist’s quest to track down the source of a recurring thunderous sound only she can hear ends in what reads as a riff on the classic Futurama episode “Game of Tones.”

Should you ever feel blasé about the homegrown moviegoing status quo, try rewarding your curiosity with the films of Southeast Asia, in which people fall in love with vacuum cleaners and debates about the divine are buttressed by humble miracles. Movies like these—respectively, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost (2026) and Phạm Thiên Ân’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023)—embrace a sense of newness. They’re rarities in today’s filmmaking environment: at once quirky, somber, spiritual, grounded, surreal, poignant, and unfailingly surprising. New York’s Metrograph theater recently programmed Currents of Southeast Asian cinema, a series spotlighting these films and three others—a “snapshot of contemporary filmmaking across the region,” according to a press release—including Bao Le’s Taste (2021), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021), and Chee Sum Chia’s Oasis of Now (2023).

Analogues exist across world cinema elsewhere. A simple glance at the films of other regions reveals such likeminded features as Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s Chronicles of a Wandering Saint (2024) and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019). But the movies of Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, and Singapore have a character all their own, tied to their cultures, and especially when they have the backing of the Purin Film Fund, a Bangkok-based outfit responsible for supporting each of the selections in the Metrograph series, and others beyond. Movies like A Useful Ghost dazzle through originality. What helps them stand out, though, is Purin’s contributions to their productions.

Just about every major continent is home to a plethora of film funds: Screen Australia, Africa Film Fund, Eurimages, the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program. Naturally, Asia has its own funding entities, like the Asian Cinema Fund. But standing against this rich backdrop of funding programs, Purin is unique: an organization for filmmakers, founded by filmmakers—Thailand’s Anocha Suwichakornpong and Aditya Assarat. Both are accomplished in their careers, each having won the top prize at International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Tiger Award, for their respective debuts, Mundane History and Wonderful Town. In fact, their successes as artists, and their firsthand knowledge of application processes for grants and funds from around the world, provide the basis of Purin’s genesis in 2017, the year the pair co-founded the group with fellow director Visra Vichit-Vadakan.

“I think we're lucky to be in a position where we can support fellow filmmakers,” Suwichakornpong says. “We're from Thailand, and there's very limited subsidies or government funding here for artistic projects—not just film, the arts in general, but especially film, because it costs a lot to make a film.”

Assarat brings up another wrinkle in the creative process. “Movie making is very, very difficult,” he says. “You don't really learn. Nobody can really teach you how to do it. You sort of have to have done it already to know. So in a way, (Purin Film Fund) is not only about the funding, but also about the expertise and knowing how to put together a project—all these things that, once you go through it, you're able to pass your experience on to younger filmmakers.” An element of networking figures into Assarat’s calculus. Attending major European film festivals, a’la the Berlinale, Rotterdam, and Cannes, got him and Suwichakornpong thinking about the benefits of having a community gathering at home rather than abroad.

“One thing that makes us unique is that we're both filmmakers and we continue to make films. Having worked grassroots, from the ground up, and having applied to all the funds around the world before there was Purin helps us in terms of guiding (the fund). We know how competitive it is in the international landscape to find funding. That was what we spoke about seven years ago when we started. How are new filmmakers from Southeast Asia supposed to compete for all these funds?” He and Suwichakornpong think of Southeast Asia as “one family,” in his words. Starting a fund that’s open only to directors from those countries means better funding opportunities for those directors, and this is key to Purin Film Fund’s conceptualization. The pair saw a need going unmet in their neck of the woods and decided to do something about it.

“Something,” at first, was producing other people’s films and offering their knowledge to up-and-comers in need of counsel; spending time on film sets and understanding the movie business as a business meant he and Suwichakornpong were well-positioned for advising new directors. “By the time that we were able to have a foundation behind us,” says Assarat, “I think that we realized how difficult it was for younger filmmakers, again, to get their start.” Alongside the unpredictability and all-around stress of making a film, there’s the matter of whether one may exercise full creative expression on their own set if they accept those government funds. Censorship becomes a valid concern.

Filmmaking is labor even when bureaucrats and investors aren’t dictating speech. Happily, Purin Film Fund bears no such hang-ups over expression. “Ultimately we were lucky to be supported by a foundation which allowed us complete freedom to choose a project with artistic integrity above all else,” Suwichakornpong notes, adding that there are other ways a film fund can obstruct applicants’ pursuit of financial backing. “There are some funds that would prefer to award projects that are later in development, that have most of their funding in place already. For us, projects can apply when they're still early on or later on.” You’d do well to show a financial plan to her and Assarat, of course, but nonetheless, they think about potential projects holistically—as top to bottom artistic endeavors that happen to carry high price tags.

This philosophical approach to operating Purin Film Fund, which frankly reflects their aesthetics as filmmakers themselves, may explain the bumper crop of idiosyncratic and sophisticated movies Southeast Asian countries have produced in the 2020s. By giving a wider range of voices a chance to be heard, Purin seems to have ignited a creative spark in the region’s budding directors. “I like to think we've created a space that’s opened up possibilities for emerging filmmakers (in Southeast Asian) to take risks, to make bolder, daring films, films that don't have to conform to certain expectations, and to expand the possibilities of cinema,” Suwichakornpong says. “I think we've been quite successful at making the cinematic landscape more diverse.”

“Diverse” is an understatement. In A Useful Ghost, a woman’s soul possesses a vacuum cleaner, and through that vessel, she seduces her husband; while the source of the inexplicable rumbling sound that’s hounded the lead of Memoria for the whole film turns out to be a UFO hidden away in the jungles surrounding Bogotá. Movies like these don’t come along every day, likely because there are only so many curatorial figures, such as Assarat and Suwichakornpong, capable of influencing their production. “Once we step in, and Purin is behind a project, it automatically kind of legitimizes that project,” Assarat says. “In a sense, we serve as curators.”

It’s for perhaps these exact reasons that Suwichakornpong and Assarat both take a humble stance regarding Purin’s effect on Southeast Asia’s slowly rising new wave; it’s not that they don’t see the ways in which they’ve benefitted filmmakers from the area as much as they clock the myriad factors that go into a project’s funding. “It's not just us,” Suwichakornpong says, “but it's nice to think we play a part in making this landscape healthy.” Ultimately, they both believe that with or without Purin, films like Memoria, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, and Oasis of Now would still get made; they’re just doing their part to help lift up their peers. “(The filmmakers) exist because they exist, not because of us,” Assarat says. “We're just one small player in the whole community. If we represent anything more than the amount of money that we give, it’s encouragement. We’re saying, ‘Hey, you're not alone. We appreciate what you do, we love what you do, we’re here following what you do, and we're willing to support you.’”